USDA releases five-year food safety plan

The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA FSIS) has released its 2017–2021 Strategic Plan, which builds on prior successes and reflects emerging issues that FSIS faces in ensuring that the food products it regulates are safe to eat. The strategic goals, outcomes, objectives, and measures set forth in this Strategic Plan provide an integrated framework for understanding how FSIS is fulfilling its mission and addressing 21st­century public health challenges.

FSIS activities contribute to the USDA’s FY2014–2018 Strategic Goal 4, “Ensure that all of America’s children have access to safe, nutritious, and balanced meals,” and the outcome, “reduction in total number of Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes, and Escherichia coli illnesses from all USDA­regulated products.” 

The Strategic Plan comprises three main goals:

1. Prevent Foodborne Illness and Protect Public Health: This goal represents FSIS’ public health regulatory mission to ensure that meat, poultry, and egg products are safe and to reduce preventable foodborne illness from FSIS-regulated foods. FSIS inspectors across the United States are working to achieve this mission by carrying out tasks to verify industry compliance with applicable U.S. food safety regulatory requirements. The agency’s regulatory oversight and enforcement extends to both imported and domestically-produced food products and assures consistent application of regulations and statutes.
2. Modernize Inspection Systems, Policies, and the Use of Scientific Approaches: Science-based approaches have provided additional insights into the ever-changing and adaptive nature of the foodborne pathogens associated with FSIS-regulated products. To protect public health, FSIS continues to explore new techniques for detecting, tracking, and characterizing these pathogens. At the same time, new information technologies are allowing organizations like FSIS to collect, integrate, distribute, and analyze large amounts of information and data to guide inspection activities. FSIS is using this information to guide and distribute future inspection and surveillance resources across the regulated industry.
3. Achieve Operational Excellence: FSIS continues to focus on human capital planning objectives as a critical part of its long-term strategy to recruit and retain a high-caliber workforce, and the agency is better anticipating new information technology (IT) requirements that support the FSIS workforce. An increasingly vital part of the agency’s mission is to better equip its employees with the data, information, and training they need to perform their jobs in an efficient and effective way, and in a manner that unites the workforce to fulfill its mission across the country.

Strategic Plan